From the Yadnya Kasada Festival at the crater of Mount Bromo, July 23, 2013.

On the fourteenth day of the Hindu festival of Yadnya Kasada, the Tenggerese people of Probolinggo, East Java, travel up the mountain in order to make offerings of fruit, rice, vegetables, flowers and sacrifices of livestock to the mountain gods by throwing them into the caldera of the volcano.

The festival began in the 15th century when a princess named Roro Anteng started the principality of Tengger with her husband, Joko Seger. The childless couple asked the mountain gods for help in bearing children and, according to the legend, the gods granted them 24 children on the provision that the 25th must be tossed into the volcano as a sacrifice. The 25th child, Kesuma, was finally sacrificed in this way and the tradition of throwing sacrifices into the volcano to appease the mountain gods continues today.

I came across this article today from Wired and just had to pass it along…!

“Lo and behold, what do I find but an entire research field that has been making manmade lava for decades. Sure, we’ve seen some of the recent manmade lava flows done at Syracuse University and small-scale lava in experiments for some time, but here I was finding research that involved a ton (literally) of manmade lava … and moreover, these lava have been made by accident on a number of occasions with tragic consequences.”

Corium… Nuclear Meltdown lava. And, I’d like to point out the lovely margin lobation!

I usually try to keep all of my ‘lives’ seperate and not cross-post, but I’m going to break the rules for today. Below is the video for my latest piano release, “Orbit: A Love Story.”

We spend our lives orbiting around each other. Some days, our gravity is huge and everyone wants to be around… Other days, friends rush away at escape velocity and are gone before we know it… Perhaps, if you are very lucky, you fall into a stable orbit with another and it can only be love…

Eldfell (“fire mountain” in Icelandic) is a volcano on the island of Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago 15 miles (25 km) south of Iceland. Photograph by the late Svienn Eirikksen, fire marshal of the town of Vestmannaeyjar.

There are three main places where volcanoes originate:

Hot spots,

Divergent plate boundaries (such as rifts and mid-ocean ridges), and

Convergent plate boundaries (subduction zones)

The origin of the magma for hot spots is not well known. We do know that the magma comes from partial melting within the upper mantle, probably from depths not too much greater than 100 km. The actual source of the heat that causes the partial melting (the actual hotspot itself) is almost certainly much deeper than that, but we really don’t know how deep or even exactly what a hotspot is!

At a divergent margin, two tectonic plates are moving apart, and magma that is generated in the upper mantle flows upward to fill in the space. This magma is probably generated at depths that are shallower than those for hotspot magmas. People argue about whether the magma forcing its way to the surface causes the plates to move apart or whether the plates move apart and the magma just reacts to that and fills in the space. Perhaps it is a combination of these two. The most extensive example of this type of volcanism is the system of mid-ocean ridges. Continental examples include the East African Rift, the West Antarctic Rift, and the Basin and Range Province in the southwestern US.

The final major place where volcanism originates is at convergent margins (subduction zones) — where an oceanic plate dives under either another oceanic plate or perhaps a continental plate. As the plate gets pushed further and further it starts to give off its volatiles (mostly water), and these migrate upwards into the mantle just under the overriding plate. The addition of these volatiles to this overriding mantle probably lowers the melting point of that mantle so that magma is generated. Part of the magma may also be generated by the downgoing plate actually starting to melt as it gets into the hotter and hotter interior.